Review: Garmin Vivoactive 6

Garmin, the maker of our favorite fitness trackers, has several series of entry-level hybrid trackers. Sorting through them can be confusing. The Venu series is the most expensive, the premium tracker with more smartwatch features (full-screen AMOLED, microphone, etc.). The Vivomove series has a hidden display and no onboard GPS. Right in the middle sits the Vivoactive series. The latest Vivoactive 6 has an AMOLED display, about a week of battery life, and of course, access to Garmin’s top-of-the-line fitness software.

I wrote previously that the $100 Amazfit Active 2 (6/10, WIRED Recommends) made me rethink what a fitness tracker’s value proposition should be, and $300 now seems very expensive for an entry-level tracker. However, unlike Amazfit’s, Garmin’s trackers and software actually work. In an unsurprising turn of events, I tried Garmin’s new AI-powered Active Intelligence, and it’s the first AI-powered fitness service that provided me with useful insights. So far, Garmin's supremacy remains unvanquished.

Old Faithful

Like all of Garmin’s lifestyle lines, the Vivoactive 6 is easy to wear, with a silicone strap, an aluminum bezel, and a light, 42-mm polymer case. It's not actually lighter than my Apple Watch Series 10, but it feels lighter, because it's plastic. The display is a touchscreen AMOLED that I found readable in daylight and responsive to my touch, although it was easy to print the screen with my sunscreen-y fingers. There are two buttons on the side of the case, an activity button and a back button. You can also scroll up and down and tap to get stats and notifications.

Garmin touts 11 days of battery life, but with multiple tracked activities per day I got about a week. It uses the Garmin proprietary plug charger, which is more annoying than it should be, given that Garmin introduced wireless charging years ago with the Vivomove Trend (although the company is far from the only one that still relies on its own proprietary chargers instead of wireless charging or USB-C).

It has onboard satellite connectivity (GPS, Glonass, Galileo, QZSS, and Beidou) to make it incredibly accurate when tracking your outdoor activities, and the usual suite of onboard sensors—heart rate monitor, blood oxygen monitoring (an important consideration if you want to switch from an Apple Watch)—a compass, a gyroscope, an accelerometer, a thermometer, and an ambient light sensor. It’s also rated for water resistance at 5 ATM, you can track swimming.

I compared sleep scores, heart rate measurements, and step counts with my Oura Ring 4 and found that they mostly tallied—although oddly enough, a restless night registered with the Vivoactive 6 and did not with the Oura, which stands out, as the Oura is the best sleep tracker that we’ve tested.

The Vivoactive 6 also has the full suite of Garmin’s long-established fitness and safety features, like incident detection to alert your emergency contact if you fell or were attacked on a run; Body Battery to register just how much energy you have left during the day; Training Readiness to assess how capable you are of tackling the day’s hard workout; and Morning Report, which greets you every morning with the weather, how you slept, and other factors (you can customize this).

As usual, there are also over 80 activity profiles and suggested workouts for different activities, like strength training and yoga. I'm trying very hard not to ding Garmin for the fact that this is one of the only watch series that doesn't have rock climbing as an activity profile. Instead, it has a ton of golf features, which, like racquet sports, more fits the Vivoactive demographic. However, it is still annoying to climb for an hour, then skateboard for an hour, and discover at the end of the day that the Vivoactive 6 thought I barely moved at all.

Need some help sorting through it all? Garmin has a 100-page manual to learn how to do all the things you can do, even with this basic entry-level tracker.

Real Intelligence

If you frequent runner social media, you will see a running joke that your Garmin is your most critical companion. What did you do that day? All of Garmin’s metrics will tell you that it’s all not enough, and you’re also probably a bad person who kicks dogs.

For those of us who just can’t get enough of wearable verbal abuse, Garmin recently launched a subscription service for the first time. Connect+ launched on March 27 and is $7/month, or $70 per year. This is comparable in price to an Oura membership plan, and it gets you features like Garmin’s new AI-powered Active Intelligence, a performance dashboard, and real-time live tracking on compatible smartphones with the Garmin Connect app.

One of the biggest pluses with Garmin is that Connect has always been free. Happily you will still be able to use most of Connect’s features without a subscription. I don’t think a subscription to Connect+ is necessary, but I should say that it’s the only AI-powered personalized recommendation service that I’ve started to check every day. For example, today it told that while my sleep has never been “poor,” my HRV status tends to vary wildly. That’s true, and I am, in fact, trying to get my nighttime scaries under control. This is a crazy detailed insight to come from an entry-level fitness tracker.

Garmins just work better than almost anything else. Every time I have a problem with a Garmin tracker, something happens to remind me that Garmin has been troubleshooting similar problems with people exactly like me for years. For example, I started a treadmill run that was suggested by Garmin Coach, but the Vivoactive 6’s measured speed was way different than the treadmill speed. After I finished, Garmin asked me to calibrate the distance. My treadmill runs were accurate thereafter.

The Move reminders were also great—instead of just telling you to stand up and walk around, the Vivoactive 6 offers you several options for a quick 30-second break, like trunk twists or toe touches, along with a timer and a video demonstration on your watch of how to do the exercise. Both my dog and I found these very exciting. The suggested workouts for different activity profiles were also consistently good, and I found myself clicking on my Garmin coach's suggested runs more often than not.

It’s hard to compete with a $100-$150 price for an entry-level fitness tracker, and Amazfit’s do look very good. But you’re just not going to get more or accurate measurements with anything other than an Apple Watch or a smart ring, and you're not going to find better training software anywhere around. I also appreciate that the company hasn’t locked the metrics that we know and love, like Body Battery, behind the subscription paywall (yet).